Have the calculator only calculate damage involving basic attacks, have it only count defensive abilities and stats like defense, sl bonus, tough, scale armor and similar abilities. Abilities like magic beam and similar abilities mostly all ignore everything except like tough, they don't really need to be apart of the calculator scheme.
So what? Are calculations done on the serverside? Or is the game relying too heavy on the processor? On the argument of making things too simple, like for example dmg indicator reminding of active spells, relics and equiment. I think it would save a lot of time for the player considering there may be dozens of entities on the field and that you have never enough time to plan and then execute the turn. Hidden effects should not be shown ofc. Please understand that this game requires you to be a genius savant at this point, especially in 2v2 mode. There are too many things on the field at once to be avare of everything. All the pleasure you get from this game is negated when you lose because of a silly mistake. If i lose because opponent outsmarted me its ok, its even fun seeing the strategy he used against me, i can also adore his cleverness of exploiting my weak point. But if you lose because of not noticing a spell effect or an equiment you just feel dumb. It is very discouraging. This is why you see player surge after expansion, buying boxes, playing 2 games then dropping the game until next expansion when their psychological wound have healed.
Could you perhaps make such a "second copy" approach and make it toggleable so people that have rigs too weak to run two copies of pox (... poor sods) can still play?
Honestly not sure. I guess increasing turn time could theoretically help if nothing else. Or just amp them differently.
Keeping the thread alive... I just want to see more opinions and Sokolov's true explanation why this cant be implemented. My argument still stays. You cant enjoy the game if it makes you fell dumb. Not having damage indicator makes you comitt silly mistakes that cost you games and makes you fell dumb (you lost not because opponent was better, but because you forgot some spell effect was on)
Honestly the game wouldn't need a damage indicator if pox math wasn't so damn trippy. Sl bonus goes after tough and defense comes in scale armor comes at the end, it's annoying to calculate that each turn especially when your trying to plan moves and counter moves and have to worry about spells. Creating something on the home page like Advanced poxnora that lists things like how defensive abilities, knock back, and other similarly annoying aspects of pox work would be nice. Truth is not everyone goes to the forums for every game they play, which is where all the important information for pox is located.
So a link to @kalasle's write up, but on poxnora.com instead of the forums? http://forums.poxnora.com/index.php?threads/poxnora-game-rules-documents-update-2-1-and-1-2.16096/
My write up is highly unofficial. There would also be more stuff for DOG to work out if the complete rules, or something similar, went up on the main site in an official capacity.
Burden on what? Sok explained there is no other way but to run code for every damage tooltip. This sounds very much like an excuse. I think modern pc's (even low end) can handle 10 poxnora's at once. I just think they dont realize how much of an improvement damage indicator would be. Sokolov didnt even bother comping up with some sort of a far stretched solution, only excuses (no offense)
The code that calculates the damage is intertwined with the code that resolves the attack and deals the damage. Extracting pieces to only show the damage that would be dealt, if the attack was made, while ignoring effects like blocking and dodging, would be difficult to do.
Well lets hope "difficult" will not be a barrier as it should not. I also hope that this discussion will increase the priority of this improvement.
I never said it couldn't be done. I was only explaining why it's not a trivial matter. I agree it's a good idea to have (like many other things are a good idea). The question is finding the resources to invest into it, and balancing the opportunity cost of that. Certainly if we were building PoxNora 2, it'd be one of the top things on my list to include from the get go, but trying to pull it with with PoxNora's current level of development is a significant challenge. Again, this doesn't mean it can't be done, or won't be done, but if it was easy, it'd already be done.